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Chapter 14: Don’t Be a Missionary, Be a Message

Osho,You heard my prayer and called me to you on the 8th of August.As I entered your room, I experienced you as a large ocean, an emptiness that I have never experienced before. I saw your beautiful being, and I was immersed in that emptiness and beauty. I felt that the ocean’s emptiness was flowing into me from you.After that day, new songs and melodies are coming from that emptiness of yours, and I don’t know anything.Osho, please explain how this can happen so easily in the master’s presence. Is it so simple? It doesn’t feel possible for me to exist in this life without having had that meeting - is that so? I feel that such a feeling might not have otherwise happened to me for many lives.Please explain the meeting of the master and the disciple.

The most obvious in life seems to be the most difficult; the most simple seems to be the most complicated.

The reason why it happens so is because the mind is not interested in the obvious. It wants the challenge of the impossible; only with the challenge of the impossible can the mind fulfill its ego. With the obvious, there is no space for the ego to grow or even to exist. The obvious is the grave of the ego. The simple we take for granted because it is so simple. Only the far away, the distant, catches our eye, invites us for a journey. Because of this, people have gone around the earth - people like Columbus. People have gone to the moon, people are trying to go to Mars, people are thinking to reach some day to the most distant stars. Nobody bothers to enter into himself, and to see the most miraculous, the most mysterious, the most fundamental principle of life, the very source of life - it is so close, so obvious, so simple.

People may not find anything on the moon; they have not found anything, but they have become great historical figures. Edmund Hillary has not found anything on Everest, but his name will remain a landmark forever. I have always been surprised that for at least one hundred years people from all the Western countries have been coming to climb the highest peak of the Himalayas: Everest. No Indian has bothered about it; for the Indian it is so obvious. The more difficult a thing is, the more attractive it is; the more unattainable, the more mind becomes obsessed.

I have heard:

A great psychologist was visiting a madhouse. The superintendent of the madhouse was taking him on a tour, satisfying his curiosities and questions about the inmates. He became immensely interested in one inmate; behind the bars, in his cell, he was standing naked. On the wall there was a small picture of an ordinary woman, and he was standing in a worshipful mood, tears flowing from his eyes. The psychologist asked, “What is the matter with this man?”

The superintendent said, “Don’t disturb him,” took him a little way away, and said, “He does not like to be disturbed in his prayers, and he is praying almost the whole day.”